"I prefer a straight fight to all this sneaking around"

If Han Solo made a video game, it would be Black, a first-person shooter crafted by the fine folks who brought you the Burnout series of games. Having been a longtime of the latter franchise, I was eager to try their first foray into the FPS genre, but was unable to find a used copy for a reasonable price. Thankfully I was able to borrow one for the weekend, and let me tell you, this game is all about teh sh00ting. Your goal, as near as I can tell, is to blow the snot out of everything around you, all the time. The first level has about fourteen seconds of "where am I and how do I shoot?" time before the entire thing just goes all to heck. Bullets fly, buildings explode, the subwoofer thumps, and the entire thing feels like the best parts of any given John Woo movie. It's crazy, and very intense, and so far, it's pretty darn cool.

However, even years after its release, I have to say that Halo remains one of the best examples of a console FPS. Perhaps even *the* best. Black is awesome, no doubt about it, but Halo's response time is quicker, environments are prettier, enemies are smarter, and control scheme is slicker. Black has you switching between the left analog stick and the D-pad just to change weapons, which makes some firefights very tricky when they shouldn't really be that way. Still, it's one crazy time and as soon as I finish this blog post I'm gonna go fire it up.

I'll probably go see The Benchwarmers with my roommate tonight, mostly because he asked me to go with him and his cousin and partly because deep down inside I have a strange affection for Rob Schneider. He was so good back in the day on SNL that I still hold out hope for a funny movie with him, even though the past years have brought nothing but trash in the form of The Animal, Deuce Bigalow, etc. But who knows...maybe one day good ol' Rob will find his groove again, and I hope to be there when he does.

Ok, time to start up the Xbox and freak out the cats. :)